Role-playing: why it sucks

For thirtyish years now, role playing games have existed, and I would argue have helped create the establishment of geekdom today. It helped join the geeks together—the mini’s guy, the comics guy, that Tolkien guy and the guy that knew everything about that “Pee-Cee” thing in the corner in ’79 all had something to do together. However, for the great rise of geekdom as has happened (or has this month’s movie openings not proved that?), RPG’s have remained a quiet obscure hobby. Card Games, Video Games, the Comic Book explosion—it’s now hip to be square, as it were…unless you have funny sided dice. Why hasn’t gaming caught on? I think, because there’s a few problems with our hobby. Here would be the Six Not Good Things I thought of at the moment.

Time: It takes a lot of time to play a game, and sadly I think it’s the biggest sin. Any game session that’s not at least four hours long doesn’t seem like anything got done, but…FOUR HOURS?! I mean, something longer than a LotR movie isn’t enough time? I’ve tried multiple times to get my wife involved in the hobby, and each time she says the same thing—“it takes too long. There’s things I want to do beside role play in an evening.”
Even worse, it takes a lot of time to invest BEFORE you play the game. There’s new rules, new worlds, and the fact that most of us know what I mean when I say “Character Creation session”. While they’re fun, that’s like having a “Scrabble prep night” before we break out the word tiles—chatting with friends for a night about how cool Triple word score will be seems not as much fun as actually, you know playing the damn game already.
It’s not that four hours is a lot of time to hang out, but four hours is a lot of time to not get a game done. It’s just there’s a lot of “Negative Time” in a game session. A lot of time spent waiting for someone else, waiting for the math to be resolved, waiting for Bill to come back from the bathroom and John to stop making stupid “Spiderman” quotes with his cleric with are funny but just not helping the game (helping me have fun, yes, but…).

Elitism: I feel as a hobby we have been poisoned by the “gamers are smarter” meme. I have seen—and been guilty of myself—pushing people away. It’s not surprising—we’re a “non-mainstream” hobby thanks to everything from “Satan is in D&D” to “Math is hard!” Barbie dolls. We like our hobby obscure and strange. While I understand where it comes from, it’s a terrible business model. Keeping our product out of the mainstream isn’t the best plan.
On a different tack, our hobby intrudes on a few Freudian issues. While I don’t think we’re pulling Jack Chick comics here, you get into your character. It’s like REALLY getting into why the little dog is a better piece than the top hat in Monopoly—you’re emphasizing with the little guy. You’re making up a history, remembering his parents, becoming involved. All of a sudden, if you loose the game it’s not just you loosing—it’s poor Scotty McScruffy being forced to go back to the mean streets of Baltic Avenue! This makes you WANT to ‘win’, so it makes you want to use any advantage you’ve got, which leads (in part) to…

Complexity: You ever read Cryptonomicon by Stephenson? It’s got a great little section where a guy goes into a college library and starts looking at a dissertation on primitive man and the caloric intake he needed to live, and how this affected art and culture. The character begins using this—a college dissertation—as a basis for a subsystem of an RPG. He goes into detail figuring how many calories each animal would have (probably on a nice chart or twelve) for calories, and of course a size modifier…
Because of the elitism, and because this hobby is all about “simulation of real things”, we tend to get obtuse. We get rules that go into crazy amounts of detail, and we have to start thinking of really weird things to do with dice and math to do it. All of this increases the amount of time needed to do something, and scares people away from the hobby.

Simplicity: I put this in to counter complexity, because it came out of complexity as an issue. A lot of games go very simplistic, which is fine for experienced roleplayers. However, I think that many times simplicity can be too over-reaching, creating a system where EVERYTHING comes down to one simple die roll, for better or worse. This is probably the ‘Lust’ on the chart—I don’t believe this is much of a problem, but more something to keep in mind.
GM’s: Let’s face it—finding a GM is hard. Finding a good GM is harder. Being a GM is a pain sometimes, which, really, is not that surprising. How many games have you run where you’ve caught yourself thinking “oh crud—I gotta plan that…” like it’s a job? The
job of GM’ing is a shockingly hard one for an entertainment source. You’ve got to be a storyteller, a referee, an actor, a director, and an editor. Oh, and there’s a pretty good shot that soon enough (due to the emotional investment in a character, the obscurity that comes with rules, and again the sense of ego that comes into play) you’ll be arguing passionately with your best friends about the best way to use a 12th century weapon—fun! Not to mention the fact that normally the GM has to put even more time in to get something good out of his ‘job’—planning, prepping, noting the page numbers, making up a whole world, etc.

A Terrible Business Model: Most games are aimed at creative people, and pretty much tell you to “go ahead and make things up”. This is a terrible idea if you’re trying to make money—we’re telling people they DON’T need the product. Or, worse yet, the other side of this is the “gotta catch em all” method of merchandising, where you’ll need to get nine books to start really playing the game. I know we’re hoping for Mom and Dad to pay the cost of a Players Guide/DM’s Guide/Monster Manual/Really cool Wizard Hat, but it seems like a better plan to keep that low to let all the kids in. And of course, the biggest problem of all is that we’re a fairly incestuous market—we’re not really aiming at new clientele for the most part. We’re all hoping that RPG.net buys our game, not new kids.